A groundbreaking new look at an American icon, The Wizard of Oz."Finding Oz" tells the remarkable tale behind one of the world's most enduring and best loved stories. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum's 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum's fantastical parable of the American Dream.Prior to becoming an impresario of children's adventure tales--the J. K. Rowling of his age--Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on a journey of discovery...View More...

Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and dozens of other children's classics, all but invented the picture book as we know it today. Combining poetic instinct with a profound empathy for small children, she knew of a child's need for security, love, and a sense of being at home in the worldand she brought that unique tenderness to the page. Yet these were comforts that eluded her. Brown's youthful presence and professional successas an editor, bestselling author, and self-styled impresariomasked an insecurity that left her restless and vulnerable. In this moving biography, Marc...View More...

Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children's literature. "Children's Literature "charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop's fables to Mother Goose, from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to Peter Pan, from "Where the Wild Things Are "to Harry Potter. The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all...View More...

This book documents the experiences of 15 mothers whose children labeled learning disabled attended public schools during the last four decades. Despite the right of parents to participate in educational decision-making, these mothers describe the challenge of exercising that right. In candid and compelling narratives, mothers speak to the language of experts, conflicts in shared decision-making, devaluation of "mother knowledge," and the influence of race, class, and gender. The constancy of issues suggests that this landmark legislation may, in fact, have engendered minimal changes in the li...View More...

The Classic Guide That Helps You Select the Books the Child You Know Will Love In this third, fully revised and updated edition of The New York Times Parent's Guide to the Best Books for Children, the children's book editor of "The New York Times Book Review" personally selects and recommends books for children of every age. The most comprehensive and authoritative book of its kind has been completely updated for the new millennium. It contains hundreds of new entries, many expanded descriptions, and notations of additional companion and related titles -- more than l,700 in all. The be...View More...

Alberto Manguel has enchanted hundreds of thousands of readers with his bestselling books, including The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Now he has assembled a personal collection of his own essays that will enchant anyone interested in reading, writing, or the world. Through personal stories and literary reflections, in a style rich in humor and gentle scholarship, Manguel leads his readers to reflect on the links that bind the physical world to our language that describes it. The span of his attention in these twenty-three essays is enthralling: from "Who Am I?," in which he recounts the fir...View More...

'The longer I live, the more I am convinced of the importance of children's books.' When Robert Bloomfield wrote this in 1817 he could have had no idea of the range of children's books to come, nor of how in England fantasy would be their outstanding form. In this survey of 400 English children's fantasies from 1850 to 2000, taking in authors from the well-known Charles Kingsley, C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling to the less-known Annie Keary, Edith Elias and Pete Johnson, Colin Manlove shows just how good their books often are as literature. He combines new interpretations of individual works wit...View More...

Edited by Morag Styles and written by an interational team of acknowledged experts, this series provides jargon-free, critical discussion and a comprehensive guide to literary and popular texts for children. Each book introduces the reader to a major genre of children's literature, covering key authors, major works and contexts in which those texts are published. Margaret Meek and Victor Watson provide a profound and revealing examiniation of the treatment of personal development, maturation and rites of passage in literature written for children and adolescents. Including a broad survey o...View More...

The fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm are among the best known and most widely-read stories in western literature. In recent years commentators such as Bruno Bettelheim have, usually from a psychological perspective, pondered the underlying meaning of the stories, why children are so enthralled by them, and what effect they have on the developing child. In this book, Ronald Murphy takes five of the best-known tales ("Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Sleeping Beauty") and shows that the Grimms saw them as Christian fables. Murphy examines ...View More...